Switch making, we learned, was a sort of side line with Ma. She earned about a hundred dollars a year that way. A customer wanting a switch would save her hair combings, and Ma would take this tangle of stuff and make it into a switch with the aid of her home made combing machine. In talking with her about the work, which interested us at first, she laughingly told us how she had made wigs for bald-headed men, too. She wanted us to know, I guess, as much as anything, that all wearers of false hair weren’t women!
After watching her for a few minutes, with the feeling that she was mostly doing this work to quiet her mind, or, rather, as a sort of accompaniment to her tangled thoughts, we went upstairs to talk with Pa. For that was our plan, you know. To our surprise, we found the old man smoking in bed, as chipper as you please. Old Goliath was there, too, with another pipe. And in their new friendship if you think the two old geezers weren’t messing up the air with tobacco smoke you should have been there to cut off a sample for yourself.
“Yes, sir,” drawled the runaway, “it’s the nature of some wimmin to be that way. They just kain’t help it, I reckon. Not so much temper, I take it, as temperament.”
“Or distemper, hey?” cackled the other smoker.
“Exactly. Take my Clarissa fur example. She just seemed to have a natural hankerin’ fur throwin’ things at me. I didn’t mind cold ’taters so much, or even soggy dough, though it were blamed oncomfortable sometimes to git some of it squashed in my face, especially when I wasn’t lookin’ fur it. But what I hated worser ’an that, even, was stove lids an’ flatirons. An’ to make it all the more onfortunate fur me, Clarissa had a most powerfully perfect aim.” A big hand parted the brown hair that hung almost to the giant’s shoulders. “See that bump? Some of Clarissa’s fine work. An’ that, mind you, is the very spot she aimed for, too. Every push with that old gal meant a put. So you see, Mr. Doane, everything considered, me not havin’ eyes in the back of my head to pertect me there, to say nothin’ of gittin’ soaked when I was asleep in my chair, it weren’t sech a terribly useless or onreasonable notion of mine to skin out.”
“Ma never throwed stuff at me much,” came the second henpecked tale, “but her jawin’ apparatus is the confoundest waggingest an’ most consistent thing I ever heerd tell of in all my born days. Talk about perpet’al motion! One day when her throat got stopped up so she couldn’t talk I swar to Peter I thought I’d lost my hearin’. I stand her gab jest so long an’ then I send her away on a vacation, so I kin git a rest.”
Poppy nudged me as we stood in the doorway.
“I guess old Pop isn’t so dumb, huh?” says he in my ear.
We had surprised the old man, all right. And listening, I was further puzzled over him. Was it a sort of lifelong game of his, I wondered, to play dumb in his wife’s eyes? It would seem so, from what we knew of him and from what we just had overheard. To hear his wife tell it, he had about as much brains as a hitching post. But in the right kind of company, as now, and with his wife out of his sight, he seemed perfectly able to spread around plenty of fairly intelligent gab.
How shrewd was this trick of his, I then thought. By pretending dumbness he saved himself the job of saying “yes” and “no” all day long as punctuation marks to his wife’s endless tongue wagging. Furthermore, he had no managing job as head of the house, for, of course, not being “all there” in his upper story, he couldn’t be expected to do much work! Some men, you know, are lazy enough to jump at any kind of a scheme to save their backs.